Jodi McAllister, explains the order she just delivered to Rusty and Michele Crane at Frasca Food & Wine on Wednesday. McAllister, is an Assistant General Manager at Tavernetta Denver Frasca's new restaurant. The couple was at Frasca for the first time.

Matthew Jonas / Staff Photographer

Tamii Nunez sits in the shade with her cat Artemis on the greenway trail in Longmont on Wednesday. More photos: TimesCall.com.

Lewis Geyer / Staff Photographer

Michael Nason does a preflight check on a helicopter before having a lesson at Colorado Heli-Ops in Broomfield Monday.

Matthew Jonas / Staff Photographer

Les Shook, of Longmont, shops in the market at the OUR Center on Wednesday. Shook is on a fixed income and lives in a mobile home park where the lot rent has increased.

Boulder County, one of Colorado’s most affluent, scenic places, is poorer now than it was 16 years ago, with incomes on a downward slide and working-class wages growing at rates less than one-third those seen in neighboring counties. Income here is defined as wages plus wealth gained from gifts, interest, bonuses and dividends, while wages are defined as money paid by employers.

From her car window, Tamii Nunez can see UCHealth’s Longs Peak Hospital. When it opens in mid-August, more than 300 people will be employed there. The lowest-paid among them will earn $14 an hour, while skilled nurses will pull in $50 or more.

It’s the kind of place Nunez, a medical student, hopes to work someday. But for now she is relegated to watching the building take shape across the street from inside her Honda Civic, where she is living with her boyfriend and cat. Often, they park overnight in the parking lot of the Walmart on Ken Pratt — a perfect vantage point for the hospital.

Nunez’s position is illustrative of the dichotomy of Boulder County’s super-heated economy: Jobs are plentiful, yet

incomes are declining. Median household income, when adjusted for inflation, dropped 4.2 percent from 2001 to 2015, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Households in the middle earned $75,556 just after the new millennium. Fourteen years later, they were bringing in roughly $3,000 less per year: $72,392.

“Even though we’ve seen this great expansion in our economy,” said State Demographer Elizabeth Garner, “we’re not really able to reap all of its benefits.”

The state’s aging population and the growth of new jobs in low-wage industries are lowering incomes overall even as the economy booms. Those providing services to the struggling say the picture is clear: more people are spending more on the essentials, and wages are failing to keep pace.

‘Surprise’ decline

Income, a measure of wages plus wealth, tells only part of the story. Boulder County laborers’ wages, though up slightly, are growing more slowly than those of neighboring counties, the state, and the nation.

Average weekly wages for private-sector in Boulder County rose roughly 6 percent between ’01-’15, when adjusted for inflation. Weld gained 19.3 percent, largely on the strength of oil and gas, and Broomfield’s wages grew by 25.7 percent. Both outperformed Colorado as a whole, which saw a 7.9 percent increase, and the nation at 9.3 percent growth.

After across-the-board increases in ’14 and ’15, wages dipped in 2016 — despite Boulder County’s economy performing better than any year in recent memory. Unemployment was at the lowest recorded level in early 2017, 1.8 percent, among the best in the nation.

“I expected to see faster wage growth,” said Brian Lewandowski, an economist at University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business. Last year’s decline “was a surprise.”

Lewandowski and Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE) economist Ryan Gedney attribute the anemic wage gains since 2001, and last year’s small declines, to two main factors: the aging population and growth in low-wage jobs.

“High-earning retirees are being replaced by workers earning lower wages, which is going to compress average weekly wages,” Gedney said.

Boulder County had a higher population, 11.6 percent, of those 65 and older in 2015 than Broomfield’s 11.4 or Weld’s 10.7 percent shares, according to Census Bureau data. A look at CDLE data shows that, of the more than 20,000 jobs added to the area between 2010 and 2015, nearly a quarter — 22 percent — were in the relatively low-paying hospitality and retail industries, where average earnings are $24,000 to $35,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Overall wages might inch up as the higher state-mandated minimum wage take effect. Lewandowski said he’s already seeing evidence of that happening.

“Almost every fast food and retail shop has hiring signs and they’re posting jobs for $11 and hour. We’re seeing market forces work on that end.”

That tallies with Gedney’s findings that the most significant gains in recent years went to those with less education. “You see positive gains among those with high school and some college. The losses were with those who hold bachelor degrees or higher.”

Wages did increase nominally in many industries last year, but with inflation in the area just under 3 percent, according to Gedney, most of those gains were erased. Lewandowski said that, given the shifts in demographics and the high-level data available, it’s hard to know if workers are indeed worse off than in years past.

“It looks like negative wage growth in real terms,” he said. “But individuals may be better off and we just don’t know from the data.”

“Data is only data,” added Garner. “It’s only a piece” of the story.

Some people are better off, some people are worse off, some people are right in the middle.”

‘Not paying enough’

Providers of assistance services in the area have a different take. Things are definitely getting worse, they say, as evidenced by the increasing number of people seeking help, including those from higher income groups.

Demand for other necessities, like food, is up in many communities, too. Edwina Salazar, executive director of Longmont’s OUR Center, said the nonprofit’s food panty is serving 1,500 families a month — up from 1,200 over the past six to eight months, as housing costs have skyrocketed.

The two groups most impacted, according to Salazar: seniors and the workforce.

“Who we’re seeing is people who aren’t getting cost-of-living raises at work,” Salazar said. “The jobs are out there (but) for the most part they’re not paying enough to live comfortably.

Ditto for seniors attempting to live on Social Security, she said: “For the first time, we’re seeing formerly middle-class seniors living in their cars.”

To address the problem, officials have expanded their focus on affordable housing to accommodate working professionals. The City of Boulder’s middle income initiative, for instance, is targeting those earning between $56,000 to $104,000 annually for a one-person household and up to about $79,500 to $149,000 for a family of four.

Many residents are also struggling under rapidly rising rents. Rents averaged $1,499 in Boulder and Broomfield at the end of 2016, according to the Apartment Association of Metro Denver — up nearly 30 percent from four years earlier.

“We’ve seen some folks’ rent go up 30 to 50 percent when it comes time to renew the lease,” Salazar said. “There are a lot of vulnerable families out there that are just squeaking by.”

Longmont has been particularly hard hit as the frenzied housing market there reaches new heights. The city saw its fifth straight record-high for home prices in May, according to a report by Kyle Snyder of Land Title Guarantee. The year’s average home price is up 10.6 percent from 2016, at $427,197, and predicted to keep rising throughout the summer.

Overall, Boulder County’s wages are failing to keep up with the cost of new homes. The median home price from 2001 to 2015 for Boulder County rose 13.6 percent.

Over that period, the median cost of a house in Broomfield rose 36.7 percent, when adjusted for inflation, and in 24.7 percent in Weld, according to data from the IRES multiple listing service.

Nearly one-fifth (19 percent) of Boulder County’s households earned more than $150,000 in 2015, according to Census Bureau data. Broomfield wasn’t far behind at 18.2 percent. The wealthy comprise a smaller group in Weld: 9 percent of households there reported incomes over $150,000, but the data suggests Broomfield and Weld’s shares of the well-do-to are growing faster than Boulder County’s.

Despite stagnant income, movement at the top is brisk. Households earning $200,000 or more annually are the fastest-growing group in Boulder County and its communities, census data shows. Demographer Garner cautions that the changes, not adjusted for inflation and margin of error, are not “statistically significant” — at best, a 1 percent increase in the top income group from 2009 to 2015 in the county.

But signs of growing wealth — real, perceived or anticipated — are evident across the Boulder Valley. Boulder Transport recently expanded its black-car shuttle services to include chartered helicopters. It’s a necessary service for the expected high-tech bigwigs Google and other companies will be bringing to town, owner Carlos Alvarez said last month.

The business also hopes to offer flights to ski resorts by the upcoming season. Details are still being worked out, but the two-hour flights will likely cost thousands.

Revenue is also up at fine dining establishments in Boulder. Flagstaff House and Frasca Food and Wine both said the last few years have brought in more guests and special events.

“With Boulder continuing to grow, we are seeing more and more business dinners and corporate events being hosted at our restaurant,” said Flagstaff manager Adam Monette.

Frasca underwent a remodel in 2010 to capitalize on its growing reputation as a destination eatery for the business elite, said director of operations Peter Hoglund. As the balance sheets of area companies have expanded, so has the average check size at Frasca.

“I always know when big deals are being done or when the tech sector is doing well,” Hoglund said. “With the addition of big businesses like Google and Twitter, with SolidFire selling, things are really good for us.”

CU’s Lewandowski said there is reason to believe things might start to get better for the rest of the workforce soon, in the form of a long-anticipated bump in wages.

Minimum-wage workers are getting a state-mandated boost in hourly pay, which should bring up the overall average. And with unemployment recently dropping to 1.8 percent, wage pressure is almost inevitable.

“We’re seeing firms start to compete for workers,” he said, “so I still believe that faster wage growth will come.”

Even if it does, it will be too late for Longmont’s Nunez. She and her boyfriend plan to move to Fort Collins by the end of the month, where she is now enrolled in school and apartments are “half the price” of rent in Longmont.

“I’d love to stay in this town, but it’s so expensive,” she said. “It’s not just us: I see a lot of people out there struggling. Every day this little transient population is getting bigger and bigger.

“You’re either going to make it really good out here or you’re not going to make it at all.”